Softcore Hardcore by Trond Borgen
Dirty Pretty Things by JJ Charlesworth
Folds and Cuts by Kit Hammond
The Luxuriance of Signs by Christophe Kihm
Individual Condition by Jim Coverley

Top

The body is always at stake in Jim Coverley’s art. He cuts it open, dissects it, dismembers it, then pulls it together again, in new and strange shapes. It is as if he abstracts the essence of pain, our very existence as human beings, from the corporeal shell and its vulnerability, in order to find a different substance, a soul, perhaps, a core of immutable identity.
There are no shortcuts in Coverley’s art. The making of it demands painstaking care and patience and a highly developed craftsmanship. Many of his cuts are so long and intricate that it is difficult to comprehend that his cut textile pieces are made simply by cutting open and removing, and not by adding elements and details, except for the folding and stuffing. Bed sheets and pillowcases are put under the surgeon’s knife, and extremely precise cuts are made. These bedclothes are not new, but old ones, found objects that carry their own history, secrets wrapped and hidden, of children’s innocent dreams in their cot and grown-ups turning in bed in their journey from childhood to a different life of pleasure and pain. Possessing our own bodies between the sheets, we turn inwards towards a basic existence, an existence as a physical entity; and in our nightmares we dream about losing this entity, our bodies being dissolved and damaged, cut open, flayed and abandoned.
It is this fundamental fear that Coverley deals with in his cut and folded pieces, whether they are done in textiles or in paper. It is combined with another fear: that we will one day end up under the surgeon’s knife because a terrible illness is eating our bodies from within. When the surgeon cuts, he requires a full view, complete insight, a physical view – nothing can be hidden from his eyes if the body is to have any chance of recovery. This clinical urge is a desire that demands everything, consumes everything. But there is a limit to how much one can remove from the body without causing permanent damage. In Coverley’s cut pieces it is as if the surgeon has gone too far, as if man has lost his bodily existence, or as if this existence has been exchanged for a different form of being. Now the body can be stretched and twisted, it can be left hanging in mid-air or thrown on the floor; it may have gaping holes or intricate and exquisite patterns, like lace. When Coverley has finished with these worn but delicate skins, the surgeon’s scars left behind after an operation are not enough. The artist expands and develops these scars into weird, beautiful but still alienating ornaments - they are beautiful in a rather disturbing way – and he forces the body under his knife into a different shape, unrecognised as the body proper, yet still recognisable as something organic, something vaguely (or distinctly) reminding us of body parts. These pieces transgress the human form as we know it. We glimpse the human body, but it disappears from our view the moment we think we have got it. Although these cut and folded pieces keep reminding us of bodies or body parts, it is difficult, or impossible, to define and explain exactly what we see.
It is as if man has violated his own creation, his own existence, and transmuted himself into the very embodiment of the suffering and pain from which he is trying to escape. This is a way of beautifying pain, thus a way of creating eroticised fetishes – states of mind as much as physical manifestations. These fetishes are extremely seductive, in their colours and their shapes; but the more closely we are drawn to them, the more we see their vulnerability. And we hesitate.
What we actually see is the human body eluding us, escaping our preconceived notions, our fixed ideas of what a body should be and look like. Everything is soft here, the textiles excludes any hardbodies and any hard core. If we find any core at all, it is soft and full of holes. Is this where we will find our soul? Do we have one at all? This is the essence of Coverley’s art: he turns the human body into a soft core that functions as a metaphor for change, pain and possible disintegration, and this is carried to its extreme, so that his softcore handling of the body becomes a hardcore artistic stance. The result is the human body doubly exposed: it is both a horrible nightmare full of pain and suffering, and a beautiful object, full of soft-spoken poetry and immediate visual and tactile qualities that are both sensuous and sensual.
Whenever I see one of Jim Coverley’s cut pieces, I think of mediaeval and Renaissance paintings of Saint Bartholomew, the saint tortured by being flayed. He figures prominently in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where he displays his attribute, his flayed skin, by holding it up like a trophy. Coverley’s flayed bodies are not religious trophies, for there is no context of eternal, divine redemption in his art. But there is redemption nevertheless: it is as if Coverley tells us through his art that the only way of enduring this life on earth is to take charge of it by commanding the body into some sort of shape and form in art, of actually fetishising it by turning it into an object of desire never seen among human beings before.
This fetishist aspect becomes clear when we look at another fascinating aspect of his art – the use of tattoos as a source of inspiration. Covering one’s skin with tattoos is precisely to take control of it by imposing on it an ordered form through artificial means, suffusing the body in the pain from the tattoo needle in order to drive away the existential pain of being, and by giving it a pattern, a shape that it did not have before. Tattooing is done by making punctures in the skin that are indelible, thus forcing onto the body a pattern that asserts that as an indelible design the body itself cannot be obliterated, cannot disintegrate or fall apart in any other way. The price paid for this is, of course, that your body no longer looks the way it was created; it has been altered, drawn and stretched to extremes. One way of stretching it that is apparent in Coverley’s objects is through the use of special nails, a process in which the piercing of the skin with the nails goes beyond the use of tattoo nails, as it is a feature that underlines not only the pain and suffering, but also the mythical understanding of the pierced body as a vehicle for redemption, as we see it both in Christ on the cross and in depictions of Saint Sebastian’s body full of arrows. Confronted with Coverley’s objects I get the feeling that man has inflicted this pain on himself, and that he cannot rely on a god to save him from this world.
Embedded in Coverley’s intricate patterns are the stains left by sleepers and lovers, on the used bedclothes that he picks up and transforms in such a beautiful yet disturbing way. These are not just found objects, they are also found lives imprinted on textiles as blurred body marks, as if stains are the only things man can leave behind from his life on earth. I think of Saint Veronica’s veil, with the imprint of Christ’s face on his way to be crucified. The stains of people in bed can hardly be seen as divine imprints, but Coverley celebrates them anyway, as something precious – as a vera icon, a true image, as is the Latin origin of Veronica’s name. So the artist picks up the true images of our lives, proofs of man’s existence, and he celebrates them through a transformation that takes away the body behind the skin, as if in a process of transubstantiation; then he nails them to the wall. Without the traditional religious context this becomes a search for metaphors of a new humanism.
Saint Bartholomew was flayed, and there is no better depiction of this transformation of his body than the one in Stephan Lochner’s painting in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, Germany, from the early 1400s. In this painting we see Bartholomew lying on a table while several torturers are busily working with knives on his skin as he is being flayed. He does not really seem to mind, as he knows that the result of this transformation is his eternal reward in Heaven. It is a horrible torture, nevertheless; Lochner’s painting gives us a clear sense of what it means to have one’s body tortured to such an extent that it is transmuted into something else – it is a transgression of man’s physical and spiritual existence in which drawing blood is not enough: this body is tortured until it reaches a transformation, a metamorphosis through pain that will leave the body without a skin, and the skin as an empty shell full of holes.
This is where we are in Jim Coverley ’s art: it is a transgressive humanist search for a tangible form beyond the imminent danger of disintegration, beyond the pain of living; an attempt to replace pain with beauty, flawed physique with elegance, chance with control, chaos with art.

Top

Jim Coverley’s exotic, unnatural, attractive, unnerving sculptures are strange entities in the scene of current art. They provoke involuntary reactions rather than allow for polite curiosity or measured interest. Unlike much current work, they don’t present themselves to be interpreted or ‘read’, and they don’t permit their spectator a comfortable distance from which to consider them, from a position of security and authority. Instead, these weirdly organic, baroque, grotesque entities intrude on the pristine space in which they are presented, resisting any sure understanding of what they are and why they are there – an experience that combines a curious, elated fascination towards their bizarre form, with a disoriented and repulsed wariness about their purpose as artworks.
That this tension exists points to how Coverley’s work assimilates the trope of ‘abject’ art, while broadening the terms by which the abject might be understood. For if Coverley’s ever-more complex and unsettling creations are strange, they are not so strange that we cannot identify influences and precedents, both within art history, and in the scene of mass culture. Coverley’s sophisticated re-compositions of worn and faded bed linen, with their horns, tendrils, ribcages, wings and orifices, call to mind the iconography of the inhuman, extraterrestrial biomorphism in the work of Swiss artist HR Giger, popularised by his designs for the 1979 film Alien. Such images of a non-human, disarticulated or reconstructed organic forms connect with other moments in recent and not so recent art, such as the relief structures of the American sculptor Lee Bontecou or, in the last decade, the opulent, fetishistic forms of the British sculptor Cathy de Monchaux. These, amongst others, provide points of reference for Coverley’s vocabulary of disconcerting proto-organic forms, whose uncertain identity provoke feelings of mild disgust or unease. An unease and repulsion which – at least in the iconography of popular culture – has to do with our reaction to forms that threaten, imaginatively, to transgress our own sense of bodily cohesion and integrity, and which is central to theoretical definitions of the abject.
Yet while Coverley’s wall-based forms integrate this imagery of the unsettled, disarticulated organic body, his understanding of the abject is paralleled by an alternative poetry of the dismal and the derelict, an elevation of things worn-out and discarded, which moves from the notion of the abject into a reflection on economy and production, and the process by which things that are new and whole decline through use into decrepitude and redundancy. And in the same breath, Coverley’s forms also suggest an iconography of suffering which would appear merely fetishistic or sado-masochistic if the materials used spoke of authority and control, rather than the weakened, fragile and wholly domestic character of the second-hand pillow cases and quilt covers that are the starting point for all his works.
These two themes, of disintegration and redemption, and a form of suffering which is as bodily as it is emotional – and which is not solely about the single, biological individual, but also about the relationships between individuals that are intimated by these faded bed covers – is what produces the strange pathos and sense of sympathy that we encounter, a sympathy that is more keenly felt because it collides with the quite opposite experience of the virile, sometimes eroticised and often hieratic character of Coverley’s totemic, remodelled forms.
If suffering and redemption are at stake in Coverley’s work, they appear in a complex series of reiterations and translations that slip from the bodily to the emotional to the economic, appropriating religious symbolism along the way. Coverley’s regular use of substantial, increasingly ornate nails to both pin and support his sculptures, directly appropriates Christian iconography, in order to secularlise it, and to bring it back to the register of thinking, feeling flesh. Coverley’s larger works, particularly Cotton Mouth (2006) and Passion Killer (2006) use the symbol of the nail in its Christian sense; Christ was also a body nailed to a cross, which suffered and was reborn. Coverley’s secular crucifixions don’t suggest an afterlife, but rather are remade, paradoxically, out of the process of their temporal deterioration, and the effect of the surgical intervention so extensively performed on them.
It is Coverley’s process of intricate and ornate cutting, folding, pinning and colouring of an essentially worthless material that distinguishes its exploration of the abject, and which draws it towards a human register of empathy and recognition. For if these sad, stained sheets, with their tired and faded patterns, represent the history of the bodies that inhabited them, this recognition occurs simultaneously with the experience of the highly coherent, often majestic biomorphic structures which they are transformed into, and which present themselves as new, in the body of the old. The previous identity of the material, and the narratives of human histories and human passions that it evokes, are in a sense seen through the newly formed shapes that demand our attention, a historical ghost in the body of the new. The two registers of information co-exist in one another, but do not fuse or merge. In contrast to some of those precedents noted earlier, what is significant with Coverley’s creations is their insistence on foregrounding the process and work of transformation rather than striving for a fantastical illusion that pretends to have appeared out of nowhere.
It is the evidence of labour that takes Coverley’s work beyond the merely representational or the metaphorical, and into more far-reaching questions of action, effort, suffering, creation and mutation, and their relation to an artistic interpretation of creativity. It is important to note that Coverley’s elaborate technique of cuts, fold, pinning and transposition are not channelled to the production of a solely decorative reaffirmation of the aesthetic possibilities of textile. The labour of remodelling which, while it takes on the identity of a sort of surgery, produces new bodies rather than modifies old ones.
This is labour as transmutation; not to alter an existing order but to change from the old to the new, in which, however, the old state of things is still traceable. In this, Coverley’s forms suggest the supercession of the evolutionary paradigm – the natural and unconscious transformation of one type of organism into another – by a more conscious, human form of transformation, one which is dictated by our will and intention as much as by unconscious desire. If there is a contemporary, Frankensteinian humour to Coverley’s work, it is turned, not towards the anxiety of producing artificial copies of ourselves, but towards the willing and happy recognition of our own mutability. Coverley’s work speaks of our capacity to transcend our history, and remake our sense of our humanity, which, without the authority of either God or evolution, is now entirely what we choose to make it.

Top

Standing before Jim Coverley’s richly layered work one is often torn between opposing senses. A sense of awe may seem misplaced, inspired as it is by apparently tawdry materials, yet simultaneously seemingly vying to be beautiful and repulsive to the eye.

Horrific medieval visions of hell, Mexican, Hindi, and baroque other religious forms seem to emerge, the colours exotic and spiritual, while at other times the profanity, and sexuality and fecundity transgresses any sense of the transcendental.

Despite, or because of, such intimations Coverley’s practice is not without a sense of violence. Inks bleed into the fabric – a process that appears ad hoc, but is in fact carefully controlled by Coverley through the use of not only ink, but clear water to draw and stain the fabric through capillary action like the surface of the skin. Colours appear as vivid bruises and half healed scars, bodily damage aetheticised like that of a martyr – saint Sebastian’s suffering at once enriching and disturbing – suffering and epiphany combined.

Developmentally Coverley’s skins imitate some of the processes of biological growth, division and inwardly folding, their dimensions expand to create bodies. Where as early works referenced more explicitly skulls and foeti used as elements within patterns, Coverley’s current practice has a more abstracted relationship with corporality. One might look towards Luce Irigary to unpick this sense of completeness in division. Only in the doubling and separation that Coverley enacts with his precision fabric surgery, only in the creation of a couple does any sense of wholeness appear.

And while the works appear to fold itself into being, a sense of violence persists, appearing equally through incisions that find their inspiration in the artifice of contemporary biology – surgery, in particular cosmetic surgery. They are bruised and cut, exposed and raw. Areas removed are recycled, turned from one part into another, put under tension, drawn back, pulled tight. Here lies an acerbic critique masked behind the initially decorative appearance of Coverley’s work.

……..

Despite this appearance, Coverley’s media are surprisingly mundane, and deliberately so. Bed sheets and pillow cases, often with kitsch floral patterns, or children’s cartoon characters. Fluffy, secure and expunged of any threat, they come from the sanitised idea of dreams as comfort and buffer from the real world. What Coverley conjures up is more the stuff of nightmares by slashing through and literally turning these surfaces inside out. One is reminded of cinematic horrors from kitsch to high art, and those treading the line in between. Revulsion, Roman Polanski’s 1970’s supernatural thriller, I perhaps the most direct of these relationships. The decorative wallpapers of a New York apartment bubbles and cracks to simultaneously terrify, seduce and envelop Catherine Deneuve as we wonder if it is a supernatural, or simply a subconscious vision.

As one zooms in more associations appear in the details of Coverley’s meticulous practice. Each of these skins is attached to the wall with painted bronze nails. Each head is a rose, unfurling to reveal in its centre a vaginal heart that is part loving, part horrific, reminiscent of the cinematic vision of David’s Chronenberg or Lynch, or indeed Matthew Barney. Each of these open ended symbolic elaborations vibrate with the resonance of an inaccessible myth. These pins are not the only purpose built tool that Coverley employs. Other unseen picks and jambs have been designed for specific use, parallels and parodies of medical instruments, or those for sexual fetishes – highly specific and in direct reference to the biological.

Such symbols are not uncommon within religions, signs of reproduction, growth, sexuality and love, albeit normally sublimated. The vagina appears in Christianity, particularly within medieval paintings of the annunciation and the ascendance, as a schism in the sky through which angels are born to earth. In baroque art forms the fold and elaboration comes to the fore, a sign of god’s infinite detail, a tribute and a devotional space in which the spiritual can be read within all things. The baroque era also indicates a decadent relationship with the body. Pleasure and pain are articulated in each ripple of drapery that stretches across sinewy flesh, eroticism displaced from body onto the inanimate trappings that surround and engulf the body on a nightly basis.

Through such imagery Coverley’s practice decadence and transcendence are transferred into the modern world in two ways. Firstly Coverley finds commentary in plastic surgery and sado-masochism, where the body itself, skin and fibre are transformed by mortal men into something more sculptural and more transcendent. While it is a cliché, we see underpinning the artist’s work a sense of the doctor as god, patient and surgeon in unholy alliance to reconstruct the world in their own chosen image.

Secondly the choice of materials, the shrouds that enwrap us on a daily basis, the comfortable duvet covers that adorned with pop cultural icons and diluted third degree arts and crafts designs, become everyday drapes of luxury that pervade within a consumerist westernised culture of consumption now so utterly absorbed they are fully incorporated in the literal sense – inscribed on the body.

……

Coverley’s oeuvre appears to lay to waste a series of beliefs, and from the off cuts create its own lexicon of symbols. While no less intriguing any meaning lies impregnable, meanings only beginning to form across the work over time. They seem to delve into a subconscious whose foetid depths touch on abject social complexes. These include sexual and sado-masochistic fetishes on the one side, and undercover differences in genetics or physiology.

Revulsion of the body is an ever present inspiration for Coverley, his studio clad in images of torture, dismemberment, sasdio-mashicism, mutilation and perversions culled from pornography of every fetish pictured in every media – but it is the moral disfigurement that lends the work a critical edge on the cultural obsession with a narrow band of physical normality and beauty which borders on the fascistic.

His current works remove sections from bedsheets to create distensions that fall from with the body, prolapsed sections turning inside out, swathes are twisted into raw approximations of contraposto, folds pinned back and stretched. For every moment of youthful beauty and drum tight skin it creates, we also see the nips and tucks, scars, folds and off-cuts that are left.

Such folds are a characteristically baroque form, an over elaboration in which the spiritual. Deleuze’s critique of Leibniz uses the fold as a leitmotif around which to explore aspects of his thinking, proposing that it is only in the understanding of architecture, science and art of that time that the philosopher can be understood. Leibniz’s religious considerations of the monad, the complete and whole god in which everything is contained suggests Derrida is articulated as an entire universe lies in each fold, and, in the form of a fractal geometry an infinite regression inside one another. That this visual prompt should be found also within Coverley’s work is apt, and one can riff between the mathematical precision, the spiritual forms and sense of completeness through this unwinding of the folds that deleuze puts forward.

While Coverley’s skins are everyday, a far remove from the decadent swathes of fabric which fall lusciously over sacred and profane figures alike within Baroque arts, it continues the tradition in todays culture when, in fact, spiritual life has been pushed further into fantasy, and a sense of belonging may only now circulate within the sense of individual self. The Monad of Leibniz, has been transferred, dissected and reconfigured through capitalist tendencies towards individualism – which may be read as both an emancipation from oligarchical power towards democracy, and as a loss of a sense of communal responsibility perhaps both at once.

From the perspective of the individual a sense of monadic completeness, a sense that the soul is godlike and complete is perhaps articulated in culture more clearly than ever before by the ability to customise not only the objects around oneself, but also of the body itself through surgery. In such a medical territory, one finds the folding together of aesthetics and science devoid of moral judgement. Balanced so carefully between decoration and gore, violence and tenderness, Coverley’s work fittingly dissects this sensibility that is to greater or lesser degrees part of our everyday lives, indicating an intriguing double bind in our culture that allows for enrapture with this quotidian baroque that lies on the surface of a moral revulsion, both with those that enact it, and our own complicity

Top

People are ‘broken’; it happens to everyone at some quiet and discreet moment. It occurs in a blink of an eye, a moment of raw, irrepressible psychological destruction that happens so naturally it is hard to recognise: the loss of innocence. Life gains speed, becoming more complicated. The ramifications of understanding the meaning of being physically orientated and our dependency on it, which is not everlasting, are what drives personal anxieties and desires: desire, obsession, dissatisfaction and a ‘sense’ of significance and meaning is at the core of my art. Being true to the material and the over riding concepts and expression are very important to me. The material chosen and every action taken to create the object is critical. I need to develop a bond and understanding with the original ‘skin’ before I can start to adjust them in any way. My work goes through very defined corporal processes to find a sense of significance, meaning and clarity. I transform objects of no real description into a form of complete distinction, although they are not born, there is a Right of Passage. I am moving found objects from comparative obscurity into the extra-ordinary. They start as blank ‘skins’, legacies of an unknown personal history. I embalm the objects with cuts and folds to extract the ‘beauty’, I reconfigure, re-align and transform, finishing when satisfaction prevails. What I call ‘the clash of body and soul’, so endemic in modern society, is of undeniable interest for me. Cosmetic surgery and the procedures used are as influencing as clothing fashions. The cut of the fabric, the extension of the human body through what ever means and the philosophy of Shelley’s Frankenstein story being like a continually ringing bell. The cut does so much with such a simple action. Imagine people going under the knife to have plastic surgery to perfect themselves when they are in fact being covered in hairline scars making themselves perfectly imperfect; the search for physical beauty whilst, in fact, becoming more flawed! But in going through the trauma of such a process, it is akin to wearing the crown of thorns; suffering but bringing one closer to one’s soul. This is where the clash of body and soul is highlighted. The modern day personal battle ground. But no matter how much skill is used, a cut remains a glorified form of butchery. It is destructive, but like a person cutting their arm in search of empowerment, it creates a sense of awareness of body and life. The fold then holds a void and generates the new incarnation. It gives back some of what has been taken away but can never hide the scars. A vision of idealised creation, like a child making a paper origami pyramid flower …spelling out I love you. My works are displayed like examples of artefacts/specimens of modern mythology. They are ‘hung,’ exposed naked on display, for all to see; witnessed like a mannequin in a shop window. They are made to be empty vessels, veneer’s or skins, alluding to how the body is constructed and how the ‘environment’ affects them. Gravity is a vital tool, it’s pulling weight distorts the objects, sagging and stretching, folds, rips and wrinkles forming. The movement of materials throughout the operation, transform’s , without adding or fully removing anything, creating the ‘vessel’. Elements reversing, inside to outside, exploring notions of attraction, repulsion, confession and fantasy.